Youth and Securitization in the ‘Global North’ and ‘South’: Cities, social housing and urban conflict (ESRC Impact Acceleration)

Recent research that I have completed with three different research teams spanning Canada, Australia, the UK and South Africa indicates that disadvantaged urban youth living in public housing projects are experiencing heightened forms of surveillance, such as police targeting (e.g. Stop and Search), which are thought to be related to rises in conservative policing reforms in many countries worldwide.

Such reforms carry substantial negative weight in the wider public imagination as individual and collective feelings of insecurity about marginalized urban youth are also increasing cross-nationally (United Nations Development Program Report, 2014). While the global nature of youth surveillance is often perceived as a given, very little comparative research has investigated the nature of these strains of increased surveillance and policing and the potentially unpredictable outcomes they may produce transnationally.

I have completed the first phase of this comparative research, which involved a cross-national study of these strains of surveillance and policing as they relate to 80 marginalized youth (16-23) living in housing estates in Tottenham, UK and settlements within and adjacent to Lavender Hill, Cape town, South Africa. The ESRC impact proposal is designed to translate these findings into capacity building in the areas of youth, welfare and security studies.